And NBC can blame only itself. For years it has packaged the international sporting event as a made-in-America variety show, so overselling the personalities and melodrama that it is sometimes hard to distinguish the Games from any other prime-time fare. The weepy triumph-over-adversity vignettes (mothers with failing kidneys, dead grandmothers, home schooling in New Hampshire) are now so common on television that NBC’s profiles of athletes, minireality shows tarted up with gauzy camera work and stirring soundtracks, look like something on ABC, “Extreme Makeover: Turin Edition.”
Alessandra Stanley in a review of the Olympic coverage entitled, ‘Idol’ Is What the Televised Olympics Try to Be, and There’s No Curling.